


Thus Were Their Faces

by nicasio_silang



Category: Supernatural
Genre: Alternate Universe - Steampunk, M/M
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2012-05-09
Updated: 2012-05-09
Packaged: 2017-11-05 01:05:31
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,954
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/400757
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/nicasio_silang/pseuds/nicasio_silang
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>There are four trains in the yard today: three headed east, one going west.  The Impala, one engine chained to four cars, is taking on the last of its supplies.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Thus Were Their Faces

**Author's Note:**

> With big, big thanks to architeuthis for a fantastic beta.

Castiel stretches his arms behind him, bends in, out. The mechanisms of his elbows feel elastic, like springs wound, lengthened, rewound. He rolls a shoulder and the ball rotates smoothly in the socket. It’s a natural movement, makes no sound. Very good. He bends his neck and his spine clacks into alignment. He takes a step, then two. The gentle compression of his ankles and knees, the supple muscles of his thighs and calves.

It will take half an hour for him to get to the the station, moving like this. He sets out.

 

The train yard is all steam, whistles, and hubbub. Soot, smoke, grit, sweat, and mud predominate. A tonic dealer, hawking his wares among the commotion, presses his cheek to the wing of the macaw perched on his shoulder. It’s a dull patchwork of color, and its reds have gone to rust. Town children play Handcar Tango and King-of-the-Castle with engine children, capering barefoot between and across the rails.

There are four trains in the yard today: three headed east, one going west. The Impala, one engine chained to four cars, is taking on the last of its supplies.

“Hey, Sam!” Dean Winchester hollers out the window of the cab.

He gets back a _What_ and a _Yeah_. His brother is hauling crates into the freight car.

“Tie down your beast, we’re pulling out in ten.”

The brother-- Sam -- waves acknowledgement and moves on down the track. Their last car is barely that-- it’s a flatbed platform hitched on double-strong to take its weight. On it sits a monstrosity of tubes, pipes, gauges, iron, and glass, all jutting from a cylindrical chassis more than ten feet long. Sam levers himself up next to it. He’s bent double, chaining it down, when Castiel approaches him.

“You’re headed west.”

Sam has to look back between his own knees to see him. “Um.” Sam straightens and turns around, glances down the tracks then back. “Seems like it, yeah.”

“Not many people traveling that way these days.” Cas raises a hand, flattens his fingers in a one-by-one motion, lays it on the wood of the platform. The machine has a warmth to it, reaching for him.

“Well, it’s not exactly the smart direction.”

“No. It isn’t.” He slides his eyes over the machine. “I’ll be coming with you.”

Sam grins like he can’t help it. Says, “Sorry, buddy, but we’re don’t really have a passenger car.”

“That’s not a problem. I won’t be sleeping much.” Cas steps right up to the platform, reaches a hand out to run his fingertips along the lower lip of the device. It’s hot like the hide of an animal. “This is yours?” Sam crouches down to catch his eye. It doesn’t work.

“Yeah. It’s a project I’ve been working on. Hey, I didn’t catch your name..?”

“You can call me Cas.” He taps a nail on the pressure gauge. “This is a bomb.” Sam crosses his arms across his chest.

“It’s not-- I mean, it’s sort of.” He frowns. “Your name is Cas, or I can call you Cas?”

“My name is Castiel. You can call me Cas.” He adds, as is the custom, “And you?”

“Sam. Sam Winchester.”

He extends his hand, and Cas examines it. Heavy, calloused, coal-stained, sun-dark. Cas takes it in both of his.

“When do we leave?”

“Hah, look. You seem really, you know.” Sam waves a gesture up and down, indicating Castiel’s body. Cas looks at it himself. Long coat, dark vest, necktie. Clean boots, dust on his pants. It seems appropriate enough. “But we’ve kind of got a job to do, this isn’t some joyride into the countryside.”

“Yes, I’m aware.” He kicks at the steamer trunk at his feet. “Where shall I put my things?”

“You know what?” Sam hops down off the flatbed. “I don’t know who you think you are, but I do know exactly where you can-”

“Cas!” Dean, jogging to them through a cloud of dust. “Hey, wasn’t sure if you’d make it. Here, we can stick that in the sleeping car, it’s right behind the engine.”

“Thank you, Dean.”

“Excuse me?” Sam blinks between them.

“What? Oh, right.” Dean slaps Cas in the arm, leaves a black hand print. “Cas, this is my enormous brother, Sam. Sam, this is Cas. He’s gonna be lending us a hand.”

“We met at the Holy Moses,” Cas adds.

“At the saloon.” Sam grimaces. “Of course. You met him at the saloon.”

“There a problem with that? He’s a crack shot, he wants to kick some freaky metal ass, he can hold his liquor, and we’re, you know.” He shrugs. “We’re down a pair of hands.”

At that, Sam turns away from them, faces his bomb and yanks at its chains. It doesn’t budge. Castiel speaks to his back.

“Dean told me what happened to your father. It was unfortunate. I’d like to help.”

“You wouldn’t if you’d ever met the guy.” Dean chuckles. When Sam turns around, his expression is set, neutral.

“No, you’re right,” he says to his brother. “We need the help.” He bends down, hefts Castiel’s luggage. “And we need to get moving.”

 

If nothing else, it wasn’t a lie that Cas can hold his liquor. He can hold it in a hollow ballooning organ in his torso, and redirect it to wherever it’s useful. He keeps to himself most of the day, but a few hours before dusk clambers into the engine room where Sam and Dean are playing cards between their stools, taking turns shoveling coal into the firebox. Cas, hesitant of the intrusion, raises a bottle of whiskey in each hand.

“In lieu of my fare,” he offers.

Dean’s got a quick grin, but he tilts his head to Sam, deferring. Sam dusts off the third stool.

“Might as well put that poker face of yours to work.”

They bet peanut shells and flint chips. Castiel considers every hand with the same quick carelessness. Sam keeps accusing him of playing a long con up until they take a break, turn on the gas lamp, and Cas confesses to not knowing the rules.

“Right,” says Sam. “We’re switching to blackjack.”

He shuffles the deck. Dean stokes the fire. Cas holds the bottleneck between his fingertips and watches Sam’s hands work the cards.

Into the comfortable silence, he asks, “What is your plan?” The quiet comes back tightly.

Finally, Dean says, “We’re gonna kill every evil, steel-hide sonofabitch there is. Sounds like a damn solid plan to me.”

“With the bomb.” Cas nods.

“It’s not a... It doesn’t blow up or anything.” Sam re-deals, hits the toe of Cas’s boot with every card and glances at him through his eyelashes. “Not if it works. Haven’t exactly had the opportunity to test it out, since it’s sort of a one-shot deal.”

“I’m sure it’ll work just fine.” Cas passes him the bottle. Dean tosses the shovel to the floor.

“That makes one of us.”

“Thanks for the vote of confidence, jerk.”

They glance at their hands. Cas has a 3 of Hearts, a 5 of Clubs. He takes a hit.

“Isn’t it your plan as well?” he asks. Dean shrugs expansively, but Sam answers for him.

“He trusts his guns more than he trusts my math.”

“That’s not true, I’d just rather have both than one without the other.” He checks his cards. “I’ll stay,” Dean says, and taps his cards twice to his knee. Sam calls and wins the hand with an even twenty. They toss their peanut shells at him. He talks while he’s dealing the next round.

“There’s a valley about a full day’s ride from here, right where the mountains start. Anyone who was west of there about a year ago is probably dead. There are things...” He looks over Dean’s head, out the cab window at the blackening sky. Turns back to the game, and hunches his shoulders. “Well, you’ve heard. Things in the hills. Come from God knows where.”

“Hell,” Dean says under his breath, and Cas nods agreement.

“Wherever, but they’re...monstrous. They’re monsters. Pick a man apart and use his body. There’s a big sucker, right in that valley. Pretty sure it’s the one in charge. It killed our ma, and it took our father.”

“It’s wearing him around like a goddamn masquerade.” Dean takes the bottle from his brother. Nobody’s looked at their cards.

“So we’ll find it,” says Cas. “And use the bomb.”

“It doesn’t blow up. It won’t hurt a person, but it should fry those bastards like they were hit by lightning.”

When the moon won’t show its face, Sam hits the brakes and the Impala complains its way to a stop.

“Won’t we block the path of another train? What if they hit us?”

“No.” Sam snorts. Holds the bottle to his lips, then his forehead. “This rail’s only westbound. And there’s no-one else going that way.”

“Nobody sane,” adds Dean over his shoulder, making a sloppy exit to the sleeping car.

“That’s not entirely comforting.”

“Think of it this way,” Sam takes some time to stand, and braces a hand on his shoulder. “If they hit us at speed, maybe we all topple off, boiler busts, big fiery explosion. Save us the trouble of getting ourselves killed some other way.”

Cas can feel the mechanisms of his face stretch into a smile. There is the weight of Sam’s hand along the struts of his shoulder.

“Yes,” he says. “Yes, that’s much better.”

 

When the sun comes up, they meet in the gun tower. They huddle, packed together in the turret, and Sam demonstrates with a calm meticulousness how the grappling gun switches out for the gatling gun, how the farsight attaches to either. He handles each mechanism in turn, and then watches Cas mimic him. _Yeah_ , he says each time. Or, _That’s right._ And once, _Hey, wow, um_ , and then his hands are on top of Castiel’s, encouraging them to grip tighter, to swivel the apparatus smoothly. The clatter of the rails is a rhythm in the metal under their palms.

“Right, so that’s about it.” There isn’t enough space for Sam to step away. “Reload as you go, I usually just keep the next ammo belt over my shoulder. And if you got something on the line and you start to feel her tip, cut it free.”

“Even if it’s the one that took your father?” He asks it straightforwardly; a tactical question.

“Yeah.” Sam doesn’t pause. “Another couple hours, we’ll be pretty far from anything. Tomorrow, we’re in the valley. We go off the rails, we’re dead.”

“Ah. And we can’t kill it if we’re dead.” 

Sam smiles, close and easy. “Exactly.”

Outside, Montana grass rolls by. It’s peaceful here, it’s summer-green. The sun cuts through the low clouds to hang curtains on the fields. They pass an empty farmstead, and then another. A procession of them, mile by mile, dotting the way to the mountains.

 

At first light the next day, they stoke the fire and roll into the valley. The slate rock scrabble foothills bracket the rails tightly, squeeze and narrow the horizon to a point of light five miles down the track. Sam in the engine room, tending the firebox. Dean in the turret, swinging north, south, north, south, eyes wide and waiting. Cas on the flatbed with a rifle and a knife.

There comes a wind through the trees. The skinny sentinel conifers climbing the mountainside sway. The smoke of the engine blows off ahead of them, and up. There’s a whistle in the rocks, traveling at a pace with them. They pick up speed.

“Eyes open,” Sam hollers into the wind.

“No shit,” Dean calls back.

Castiel lays a hand on the bulbous skin of the bomb and steps around it. The platform judders under his feet. Ahead, to his right, a line of pebbles clatters down the hill and pings against the tracks. There is something. He crouches, raises a hand to signal Dean, and he sees the turret swing. The rock gravel comes down in a stream. A tree groans.

It comes from between two boulders, fifty feet up the slope and moving fast, even with the gun tower. Dean lets loose, kicks up dirt and a hiss from the hillside. It keeps coming, and Cas hears Sam shout something full of rage and horror from the window of the cab.

It’s a snake the length of a train car. Its skin gleams dully, segmented steel and rust. The thick tail of its body tapers to a clutch of knives. It wears the face of a man stretched taut and weird across the steel bones of its skull, but there is nothing of the man himself there, nothing of his sons. It’s a sneering, vapid thing. Cas gets a shot off and hears it ding off the serpent’s hide.

“Bastard,” Dean is saying it over and over, firing and firing. “You bastard.” Sparks fly from the snake’s skin.

Under his feet, Cas feels the pull of the wheels locking. Dean’s pulled the emergency brake. The axles creak, unwilling. Sam shouts, throws the cab door open, fires blind and curses at his brother. There’s no answer but the clank of a new string of rounds fitting into place.

The Impala shudders to rest. The snake rears up as it passes the last of the trees and slides down to the tracks. Cas aims for the gruesome face of the thing. As he pulls the trigger, it turns to look at him and its jaws open, improbably wide. It swallows the round neatly and twists its neck, mocking.

Sam is on the ground, running to get behind the snake, when Cas sees a new commotion at the tree line. He’s off the train and sprinting before he can reconsider.

His legs click as he runs, sharp and fast like a second hand. He shoulders the rifle, skirts the whipping tail of the snake, and circles. Closer, he sees the skin of it is ragged, scaled like a cat’s tongue. Red tissues stretch between the plates of its carapace, and its movement makes sound. Scraping, wailing metals, and the soft liquid noise of its guts. It ignores him and goes for the train. Behind him, Cas hears Dean firing off shot after shot, no time to swap in the grappling gun.

Sam has a hatchet and a revolver. Two shots left. Cas is almost to him.

“Sam! Sam, come this way!”

The hillside, the rocks, the trunks of trees swarm with motion and geometric shapes. Sam’s back is to it, he’s steadying his hands for a shot at the back of the snake’s glinting head. Cas takes him by the sleeve, throws the shot wide. The snake’s head turns.

“Run.” Cas grabs a handful of Sam’s jacket. Sam can’t take his eyes off the thing’s face. He trips backwards up the slope. “Sam, we need to run.”

There’s a chittering all around, a cicada muttering chatter vibrating the air. Dozens of them emerge from the forest, from the rocks. Each as big as a dog, bigger. They’re angular pantomimes of animals, an army of plate and stolen skin. Mandibles, scorpion tails, arachnid limbs, wolfish jaws, and each with eyes peering out from behind the flesh of a human face. They rush at the train, and ahead to the west, behind to the east, they’re already down the hill and tearing at the tracks, crippling them.

They move in crescents, avoiding the snake. It uncurls itself, swings around; it catches Castiel’s eye.

“The bomb,” Sam says. He’s breathing hard. “We gotta set it off.”

“I think it knows that.”

It herds them. Dean peppers the ground with bullets from the gun tower, trying to cut a path, but it pays him no mind, and soon he’s got other things to worry about. The beasts are clawing through the engine; there’s a hiss as they puncture the boiler.

The snake places its long body between them and the rails, and slithers up the hillside, snapping its ragged jaws at them. Cas fires off a shot that catches it between two scales. Something black and bloody oozes out and it hisses, folds back on itself. He takes Sam by the wrist and they climb the slope, pull themselves up with the trunks of trees.

“Dean!” Sam shouts back down the hillside into the noise of gunfire, of clanging limbs and clasping mouths, over the complaints of the train as it’s mauled. “The bomb!”

“Can he get to it?”

“No, but he can hit it.”

“Is that safe?” Cas squints at him.

“Not for those freaks, but we should be fine.”

There’s a hiss and a scrape behind them, that heavy dragging sound. It’s the only warning.

Sam hits the ground, cut down at the knees, face to the gravel and howling in pain. Cas can’t move fast enough to avoid the next blow. He’s knocked aside, slams into the trunk of a pine and hears a crack in his arm like the sound of a lever breaking off. He slumps to the ground on the wrong side and feels nickelspark shoot through his bones.

Down the mountain there’s the sound of gunfire, intermittent, then a long, weighty crash that can only be the engine tipping over. Cas can’t move the fingers of his left hand. His rifle is out of sight somewhere. It doesn’t matter. The snake is here.

Sam’s on his stomach, digging his fingers into the ground, trying to pull himself up the hill. Dirt in his hair and grit on his face, and he’s lost the hatchet. The snake, behind him, is twined among itself, screeching its skin together, bobbing its head like a cobra. Its serrated club tail is buried in the meat of Sam’s calf, not pulling, but keeping him there. Pressing down. It makes a wet sound.

There’s a rock in Castiel’s hand. It hits the snake on the side of its jaw. He lands another, and then another, and finally it turns to him.

The snake keeps Sam pinned, but its top half unfurls. It reaches its face to Cas’s. Right up close, it smells of rot and oil. It opens its mouth to showcase its hundred gleaming needle-teeth. The skin of John Winchester’s lips has torn at the corners. The face hangs tight and ragged on that round skull. The eyes protrude oddly, not in line with the spaces where a person’s eyes would have been. Lashless and lidless, black and dull as coal.

The snake leans in and sniffs him, then it says a word that means nothing to the human ear. Cas’s lip curls.

“You’re wrong,” he says.

It huffs, it chuckles. Its breath smells of bile and brake fluid. _Brother_ , it says in its sibilant tongue as it rears its head above him. _Little brother._ It strikes. Cas reaches out his palm to catch it. He hears Sam call his name, but it’s already begun.

The scaffolding of his bones shudders. A conductor, a current. Static runs between his body and his clothes, lightning between his teeth. His hand hits the thin skin of the snake’s forehead and fizzles on contact. They ignite.

A charge from the ground through the soles of his boots and the segments of his limbs, through the clockwork of his organs and the cogs of his joints, rushing out through his fingertips and lighting up on contact with the beast, burning through its stolen face and melting right into the steel plate of it. The snake lurches, stiffens, screams. There’s a sickening sound as it rips its tail from Sam’s leg, but it can’t flail far. For a moment, it’s engulfed in a flare of light. The next, it’s a steaming husk, dead on the ground.

“Cas.”

It takes a little while for Castiel to come back to himself. One of his arms is out of socket. He can feel it hanging limp like a doll’s limb.

“Cas.”

Sam’s voice. He’s slumped, half standing, one leg drenched in red. He’s found Castiel’s rifle.

“Sam, we need to help your brother.”

“You’re not going anywhere near my brother.” He tries to lever himself up with the butt of the gun, but can’t sustain it. He falls on his side, swings the barrel up one-handed to aim between Cas’s eyes.

“Let me see your leg, Sam.”

“What are you?” Sam watches his face. “Don’t lie.”

“I am...different. A spark of the divine.”

“What does that mean?”

“You’re a soul inhabiting flesh. I am a spark that animates this machine.”

Sam shakes his head. He’s squinting against the pain. He waves the rifle at the still hulk of the snake.

“It knew you. I saw you. You’re one of them.”

“I’m not.”

“You’re not _human_.”

“No. But I’m nothing like them. I left them. I’m...a middle ground.” Cas tries two steps forward, and Sam fires a shot above his head.

“Bullshit. Who are you wearing?”

“No one died for this. Sam, let me look at your leg.”

Sam’s arm is drooping, his head lolling, he’s sucking air through his teeth. When Cas crouches next to him, it’s because Sam doesn’t have the strength to do anything about it. Cas strips out of his vest and lifts Sam’s leg without preamble, slides the cloth under to get it out of the dirt and the rock. Sam throws his head back.

“ _Bastard._ ”

“Hold still. We don’t have much time.” Cas tears the sleeve from his damaged arm. “This will be awkward to bandage, one-handed. Apologies.”

“Sure, sure, hold still. Can you even-” Sam gasps. Cloth slips too slick through the mess of his calf. “Can you even feel anything?”

“Yes.”

“How?”

“It’s difficult to explain.” In the distance comes a high whine.

“Well, I’ve got some time.”

“Really? How succinctly could you describe _your_ nervous system?”

“What’s the rush, you gotta go report back to the hive mind?” Sam falls back on his elbows.

The sound is growing. It’s ringing in his ears, climbing up the hillside. Cas tries to concentrate on his hand on Sam’s knee, to concentrate on Sam’s wary eyes.

“He did it,” he says. “Your brother set off your bomb.”

There’s something then, in Sam’s face. More than he should have hoped for. In the set of his jaw, and a glance up the mountain.

“You gotta run,” says Sam, but Cas is already shaking his head.

“I couldn’t outrun this. You built a good machine.”

Sam makes a small sound. He manages to get a hand onto Cas’s. He presses at the flesh, at the fine wires beneath it.

“You too.” The whine is at a fever pitch. Even Sam can hear it now. “Why would you do this.”

Cas takes a breath, and settles down next to Sam. He folds his bad arm into his lap, and uses the other one to shrug.

“I like people. And I don’t much like them.” He nods at the snake’s body. “So, I figured, what the hell?”

“That’s... That’s a really stupid reason to get yourself killed.” When he looks over, Sam’s almost smiling.

“Maybe it won’t kill me,” Cas says.

“Because you’re different?” Sam is drifting, unfocused, fighting to stay awake.

“Not that different, no. It should kill me. I was just hoping for a miracle.”

The pulse from the device is creeping up the hillside. Cas can feel his toes start to tingle, his feet go to pins and needles. He loses moments between the seconds. Sam is warm next to him, though. Falling asleep, bleeding through his bandage. The wave of unconsciousness laps at them both, and they blink out.


End file.
